In the Gold of Time

Claudie Gallay (translated by Alison Anderson)

A young father — whose name we never learn — takes his wife Anna and their twin daughters to their summer home, a cottage by the sea in the Normandy port town of Dieppe.

Returning from the local grocer’s on the afternoon of the girls’ seventh birthday, needing strawberries to finish their cake, he sees an old woman struggling to carry her bags, and lends assistance. It is only upon reaching home that he realises he has left the strawberries behind with her. They are an excuse to go back, and he does, the following day.